The
mysterious polar craters of the moon,
often hidden in shadow, will soon be shown in a new
light. NASA scientists
are currently working to offer up illuminating details of their
topography for the first time with the most precise
and complete map to date, thanks to NASA's
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and
the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA).

According
to NASA's web page, LOLA, which is on board the LRO
spacecraft, works by propagating a single laser pulse through a
Diffractive Optical Element that splits it into five beams. The beams
strike and are backscattered from the lunar surface. From the return
pulse, the LOLA electronics determines the time of flight which,
accounting for the speed of light, provides a precise measurement of
the range from the spacecraft to the lunar surface.

"Recent
papers have clarified some aspects of lunar processes based solely on
the more precise topography provided by the new LOLA maps such as
lunar crater density and resurfacing by impacts, or the formation of
multi-ring basins," said Dr. Gregory Neumann of NASA's Maryland
Goddard Space Flight Center."

"The LOLA
data also allow us to define the current and historical illumination
environment on the moon," said Neumann.

Vital to
finding places that have been shaded for long periods of time, lunar
illumination history will help scientists with discovering areas that
act like cold storage and are capable of accumulating and preserving
volatile material like water ice. They are generally in deep
craters near the lunar poles.

"Until LRO and the recent
Japanese Kaguya mission, we had no idea of what the extremes of polar
crater slopes were," said Neumann.

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